Which all is cited as "proof" that the system doesn't work, and more calls that government should do even more to "solve" it. And the death spiral continues.
Looking at the data for the US, there seems to be an even more exponential curve between 2015-2020, which would imply that these trends could have been further exacerbated by the reduction of government regulation. The same is likely true for the concentration of wealth, the loss in small businesses, disenfranchisement, etc.
Regulation has driven a lot of industry out of America, as it made it too expensive to operate here.
In what area has government been reduced?
In tech, while there are some regulations, I definitely believe that more need to be established, especially regarding the topic of the article. Tech is a bit too loose right now, with the exception of the health industry.
Are you sure? Hasn't government K-12 spending per student increased far faster than inflation? And how about all that federal money for student loans?
Keep in mind that money always comes with strings attached.
Do you have any sources? I think most offshoring is driven by significantly lower labor costs in other countries. For example, China has a highly controlled economy, but American companies still offshore work there simply because labor is cheaper. Indeed, we've seen some "onshoring" in recent years[1] now that automation is far more prevalent and labor cost is less significant as a portion of operating costs.
[1] https://www.engineering.com/story/automation-is-making-onsho...
— Bill Clinton, 1990 something
We’re still living in Reagan’s World and they still don’t get it.
https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/livsvillkor-levnadsvanor....
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2023/world-happiness-trust-...
Take Canada as an example then. It has a strong welfare state, is neither miserable and poor, nor ethnically homogenous.
To be clear, neither Canada nor Scandinavia is perfect nor perfectly happy.
Alban Uzoma Nwapa (born 26 August 1957), better known by his stage name Dr. Alban, is a Nigerian-born Swedish musician and producer with his own record label, Dr. Records.
His music can best be described as Eurodance/hip-hop reggae in a dancehall style.
He has sold an estimated 16 million records worldwide and is most famous for his worldwide 1992 hit "It's My Life", from the album One Love.
Welcome to Sweden (1990): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uPDfuC3Jck
Pretty hard for a lot of people that doesn't make multiple hundreds of thousands dollars an year to not depend on the government, when lax fiscal policies completely devalue their money while inflating the assets and the pockets of the oligarchic class.
Get real, the oligarchs don't want less government, they want less of the big goverment money going for other people than the oligarchs. Not a single one of them want free markets, not one of them wants fiscal discipline, not a single one of them want real free trade.
They nurture crises for years so they can extract more when we cannot ignore the crisis anymore, and emergency measures are required. They have postponed the energy transition, their foundations and their grants helped to demonize nuclear when we desperately needed for it to evolve and expand. Now we are faced with an emergency, and we are pretending that nobody is going to make loads of money out of renewables, and that probably it is going to be the same people who made lots of money from oil. The bills will explode for the common folk, like they are doing in Europe, and in the end, if we escape deindustrialization, they will use the government to extract money from the people again to finally nuclearize our power generation.
So, if we want to talk about big government, let's talk about big government, but let's be honest and admit that big government, big corporate and big finance are basically siamese twins.
"Lax" policies would have avoided repeated and continuous intervention and let the chips fall where they may.
Almost all economic reforms are done "to save the welfare state". Especially reforms that slowly dismantle it.
The time for skepticism about the scale of the effect of social media has passed.
They also take place without any oversight.
At this point, though, young people are far more likely to doom scroll, fantasize about influence or whatever online than they are to be watching television.
It's also worth noting that this is a "teen mental health crisis"- television has been around long enough for several generations to go through teenage years without a similar experience.
If anything, we've relaxed our attitudes towards having a 24/7 propaganda box shouting in our living room.
But we're talking about societal problems, not your particular case. You've no shortage of neighbours whose brain turns off the moment the boob tube turns on to some talking head screaming about something or other.
These teen mental problems are a result in a shift in attitudes in America - the attitude that everyone is a victim, achievement is bad, one should get everything for free rather than the old idea that kids should work for their goodies, the mounds of presents kids get for Christmas, participation awards, everyone gets an A, parental supervision of kids play even into mid teens, testing is bad for kids' self-esteem, kids are too fragile for testing, and so on.
I.e. the old virtues of industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, etc., have all but disappeared.
For example, in my day (when people walked uphill to school both ways) kids routinely got jobs as soon as they turned 16. Today, many peoples' first jobs are not until they graduate from college. That's a massive change.
Kids need to learn how to deal with adversity as they grow up. Parents these days are able to remove all adversity from kids' lives, up until the mid-teens. Then, parents cannot do that anymore, and the kids have not developed coping skills for adversity. No coping skills, parents can no longer fix it for them, leads to mental health crisis.
It used to be that you'd color in some pictures to save the rainforest or the whales. Now, it's we need to radically change society or else climate change will kill us all. Despite more people being killed by fists and feet than rifles, school shootings sound like a daily occurrence and might happen at any moment. Having white skin makes you guilty of having too much privilege. Accidentally calling someone by the wrong gender is practically a crime. If your grades aren't good enough or you don't have enough extracurricular activities for college you'll never make enough money. Anything you say online will haunt you forever. Being popular among your peers doesn't just mean being cool at school, everyone is always online spreading influence. There's no way to turn off anymore, and they're convinced they can't or they'll miss out.
They're literally surrounded by existential crises day in and day out. Going through puberty is hard enough, but somehow we've made it harder for them.
Anyhow, I agree. Victimhood is a pernicious belief. People don't understand that it has an appeal to it which must be resisted. I'd describe it as a vice just like anything else: anger, jealousy, etc. These are natural emotions, and they do have their own appeal, despite being "negative." And although it can be difficult, these sorts of feelings must be kept in check for the sake of yourself and others.
~ Socrates
Seems like every generation is doomed to lose touch with the next generation and pontificate as to why they are the worst generation yet and everything is falling apart.
The medium is the message!
I think scapegoating advertising is a mistake, because I think we're missing the real problem.
Yes, advertising can and often is unethical and harmful. I can't speak for other advertisers, but I take ethics very seriously. I don't participate in advertising aimed at making problems seem bigger than they are for the sake of selling a product. It's effective (in terms of sales), but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I did that.
But: What exactly changed about advertising around 2010 if we're going to say advertising is responsible for a radical decrease in mental health since that time?
On balance, I don't think advertisers today are less ethical than they ever were. The same bad actors exist. There are more laws today to prevent the worst abuses, but there are still ways to legally manipulate the public that I would consider horribly unethical.
Yes, we have access to more data. But from my perspective, I haven't seen data used effectively for much more than targeting, i.e. prioritizing ad budgets towards the people most likely interested in your product. It still makes me uncomfortable, but can that alone impact mental health at these levels? I don't think so.
And so my problem with scapegoating advertising isn't that it's unfair to advertisers. We deserve a lot of the vitriol sent our way. My problem with it is that if we're wrong in our diagnosis, the real problem(s) remain unchecked.
The vast majority of the people I know in advertising didn't want all this data in the first place. We were happy to just work on creative ideas, to try and paint a product in a new light so that the general public would take notice.
What changed is social media, and the social media companies themselves. I truly believe the problem is with engagement metrics and all the crap they do to keep people addicted. Advertisers, in turn, are forced to play the game, because it's the only game in town. If you're not advertising on social media, you might as well not exist. And if you don't play the engagement game, you might as well not be on there at all. It's a trap.
That's not to say there's no one in advertising who is genuinely content to do harm. They exist. They've always existed. But they didn't, and couldn't have, created the platforms and the algorithms that multiplied the problem since 2010.
Further, when I look at my own use on social media, the most toxic content isn't sponsored content or ads, it's stuff that's gone viral by content creators and political actors. It's "recommended content" that should have been flagged as wildly inappropriate rather than promoted for more engagement. Saying the problem is advertising misses all of that horrible stuff.
So again, not trying to say advertising is good for the soul. Not saying it's a net positive for society (although I think whether or not it's a positive has more to do with WHAT is being advertised than the act of advertising in it of itself).
But let's not mistake advertising as the cause of the mental health crisis, at least not without solid evidence to back that up. I don't think the evidence in the original post would support that conclusion at all.
Advertisements in the past had always been fairly simple to ignore. Billboards, commercial breaks, and print or even radio ads were disconnected from the content.
Today ads are in many cases often indistinguishable, even if labeled from content.
Facebook ads look like regular posts, and many ads ARE regular posts. A fitness podcast talking about their sponsors product with the same tone and passion as the content or simply being paid to influence on a product.
Everyone pretty universally used to recognize and be annoyed by commercials and pay little attention to ads.
Now, especially young people, can barely even recognize ads. Especially those done by so called influencers which are just part of the regular content flow.
Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
That's a huge change.
So I'm not arguing that that's not a bad thing. It is a bad thing, in my opinion. Anything that's done to deceive the audience in any way is unethical.
I'm saying it's not new, and certainly didn't suddenly take off in 2010. It's been a mainstay in mass media for almost as long mass media has existed.
Further, what Facebook has done is treat all ads the same as regular content. That's not something advertisers chose to do; it's something Facebook chose to do. Blaming advertisers for a decision they had no part in is missing the mark.
To be clear, I think many advertisers are probably pretty happy with what Facebook did there. But that's not the same as the advertisers being responsible for that decision. Facebook did it because it led to more clicks and therefore more revenue for Facebook. Same thing with how Google has progressively made search ads nearly indistinguishable from regular search results. Advertisers didn't do that. Google did. Advertisers didn't decide to make the first 75% of results on Amazon be sponsored or promoted products. Amazon did that themselves.
> Google, Amazon, And Facebook are 3 of the 6 largest companies in the US and are effectively advertising companies.
They're media companies, not advertisers. They sell advertising, as virtually all media companies do (with exception for publicly funded or high-subscription-fee companies). Advertisers buy advertising space.
So if your argument is that Google, Amazon, and Facebook are making advertising worse, I agree. If your argument is that advertisers (the people buying the ads) are making things worse, and that this correlates to the drop in mental health, I don't completely discount the theory; but I'd need to see a lot more evidence to support that contention.
• Slushy machine!
• Buy our cereal, it has a buff friendly tiger with a dashing neckerchief!
• Buy our chocolate, the sexy cartoon rabbit lady/ambassadorial guests say it's wonderful!
• Here's a small man made of butter playing a trombone!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGHLriHhvtg
• This anthropomorphic telephone wants you to get a loan!
• Weird adverts that turned out to be for perfume or sometimes beer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mp646_H_xo
None of this seemed to be aiming at getting anyone depressed.
Every single one of those adverts gave the message "If you don't buy this product you'll be unhappy/unattractive/hungry/missing out/uncool." Every single one. None of them aim to make people depressed, but they all do exactly that if you don't buy the product.
It's worth noting that all the adverts you remember are for products that were wildly successful at the time. People are very willing to pay to avoid being unhappy, even if when the message is coming from a cartoon rabbit.
- It's optimized to "maximize engagement," which is code for making it addictive. When anyone says engagement in our industry it's usually a euphemism for addiction.
- It does this by sorting content to present "engaging" content first, which due to how humans' brains are wired tends to be content that is emotionally triggering in some way.
- It's primarily consumed on a device that people carry with you and that has an interface that makes infinite scrolling easy, replicating the basic design of a slot machine.
There were dumb panics about books, but citing those to dismiss concerns over social media is intellectually lazy. They are very, very different things. Books don't watch you while you read them and fine-tune their content in real time to maximize the amount of time you spend reading them.
Wikipedia on its own with zero-cost internal hyperlinks was also addictive. There were people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes well before they were getting themselves into Youtube rage bubbles.
That's to say-- I think it matters what one is getting addicted to.
Society can bounce back from people who got addicted to studying too much of various bona fide topics like constitutional law and industrial hygiene.
On the other hand, society would have a harder time recovering if a critical mass of citizens are quantized to mostly low-effort rabbit holes, like believing the earth is flat, or fiat declarations that maritime and common law are the only legally binding forms of constitutional power.
Social media mostly or completely removes these loci of control. You are fed "content" by the simple act of scrolling down the page and what you see is often determined by an algorithm. Because the feed is always changing it's often difficult or even impossible to get back to the same "state" so there's a sense of FOMO as well.
Fair point comparing infinite scroll to slot machines. Books end, newspapers and magazines get thrown away. Always more to scroll.
–Chris Cutrone
Karl Marx celebrated capitalism for the same reasons you do, while at the same time recognizing the unlikelihood of capitalism being the final form of human organization. Of course, that was before our current awareness of global warming.
Even if it did, the average height increase the world over shows that capitalism has been an enormous win in food production and elimination of starvation.
Source(s), please?
TLDR; famines require political will to be prevented, first and foremost[0].
When you eliminate starvation, as it has happened also in non-capitalist socities, e.g. the USSR & China during the cold war, and despite horrible famines during the 20th century, everywhere, including in those two countries, height is driven by diet [1].
Specifically protein quality in developed- and protein quantity in developing countries. "Developing" says something about the standard of living, health care, access to food & water, or lack thereof.
It says nothing about the underlying economic system.
And any you make is at best correlation. Prooving causality would be extremely difficult and easily countered (see above, USSR & China, but there are many more examples). But as you made it, again, sources please.
But what is easy to make is actually the opposite point. That late stage capitalism drives inequalities in access to food in general and healthy food specifically[2,3].
And that it developed instruments that create what amounts to devastating effects to particularly people in developing societies. Often those that are capitalist economically or authoritarian politically or, worst, both. With your meaningless counterexamples in the middle eastern countries who have immense wealth from natural resources coupled with low population density.
That said: whenever I study food labels in a supermarket in the US and look at prices of food that is not highly processed and doesn't contain ingredients I would never put into my body, it is obvious that the same is true for a country that would certainly describe itself as both "capitalist" and "democratic". ;)
But to go back to your point: you are linking a cause (capitalism) with an effect (less starvation -> increase in avg. height) wrongly. What do you think Victorian England was[5]?
What do you think the middle ages in Europe[6] looked like, economically? Those are all examples of capitalist socities.
The main force that brought down starvation would probably be a combo of humanistic thinking (and eventually the acknowledgement of human rights) and modern logistics.
And the main counterforces in the 20th century be blatant ignorance of humanistic principles and wars of political systems (those two are often tightly coupled, obviously).
[0] https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/dmfile/wp105.p... [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X1... [2] https://progressive.international/wire/2022-08-11-capitalism... [4] https://www.internationalhumanistparty.org/en/article/financ... [5] https://victorianweb.org/science/health/hunger.html [6] https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/09/04/famine-and-deart...
Finally, the Soviets allowed farmers to farm small plots of land, and sell the result. This became the backbone of food production, not the collective farms.
In the 1980s Kansas became the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union" as Reagan sent huge quantities of Kansas wheat to the USSR.
As for the US, the never-ending specter of famine ended around 1805 or so. Since then the height of Americans shot up. It was not do to any humanist thinking or modern logistics or government programs. It was due to the free market.
While you seem certain simply that they're caused by the absence of a free market (the latter is, in itself, a challengeable claim).
For which you provide zero sources again as well as not providing any sources for the even more outlandish claim that capitalism increased average height. Which was the actual reason I replied to you.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%...
If we think that food is generally abundant, I think it would be fair to say that famines are caused because people are deprived of food that is available, but either too expensive, and/or too valuable to other parties.
Given that, any example of famine or malnutrition, should be considered.
More recently, half of Africa and SE Asia had malnutrition issues. Only in India, ~100M people currently suffer from malnutrition.
I'm pretty sure that's not linked to drug abuse.
> "the phone-based childhood"
We can take this even further: it's a Phone-Based Education and Social Discourse
What has happened in the "Anglosphere" is that we have opened a for-profit Pandora's Box of resentful and manipulative discourse that makes no damned sense to people who are looking to their society for sense and guidance.
As you say, the system is full of manipulative actors. Not all of them are foreign.
Social media is "adversarial" in the sense that yeah, most platforms want to maximize engagement, and maximized engagement might not be best for you. But that's also the relationship you have with companies selling you sugary food or expensive shoes. They're not your friends and they want you to spend money in ways that might not benefit you. We manage.
Ultimately, you have agency to shape your experience. You're not "addicted" to it any more than one gets "addicted" to chocolate or Louis Vuitton. Social media ended up replacing social life for many teens, and it's probably useful to ask why - this isn't Mark Zuckerberg's design.
At some point, adults in the developed world decided at some point that it's not OK for children to play unsupervised outdoors, walk to school on their own, and so on. It's probably a function of increasing standard of living and plummeting birth rates. Just 50-100 years ago, you had multiple children with the expectation that not all of them will make it to adulthood. Nowadays, most families will have one kid - their single most important "investment" - and they have the means to tightly monitor and control their physical environment. The internet is sort of the only place where you can meet with friends and have fun unsupervised. It's an escape hatch.
I don't see how banning or regulating TikTok or Facebook really solves this.
The algorithmic feed and what is shown is absolutely by design. I don't use social media so I don't know how good / bad it is but there's clearly intent.
Comparing social media or Youtube to literature or D&D doesn't really work for me. This is more akin to a billion channel cable service where your remote only works some of the time. You use it to socialize with your friends, but you're also forcefed content that you didn't ask for, that may or may not be good for your mental health.
And yes, adults have agency but this article is about teens who have agency but are still growing and don't have the experience to make good decisions.
I don't see how you can compare it to Chocolate? It's in our pocket and it's infinite.
The number of people on social media even that can’t mentally withstand the negative effects absolutely dwarf the number of people who have ever placed violent video games.
Notice I’m not making a statement on games at all? The could be the absolute worst thing in the world for mental health, and by scale social media still is the larger issue.
The linked substack frequently asks why social media is like that.
Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_Is_the_Massage
The slightly alternative title is a play on words that was originally an error.
The culprit is manipulated mass media, the current version of it is social media so before mark Zuckerberg the culprit was television owners, not whatever excuse you are trying to find to not blame media.
You may well be right, I concede that I also believe that mass media is at least part of the explanation, but I don't think we should act so certain and refuse the debate. The current state of psychology and social sciences don't warrant by now this extreme level of confidence in a handful of studies that seems to corroborate this hypothesis.
My preferred explanation (and the post preferred explanation) is the one with most evidence available. Yours is a very strange theory that got ranked above all the discussion about the negative influence of social media and the responsibility of the owners and workers. We are past the time to think that this is coincidence.
I think there's are huge risk that we are about to realize that either social media cannot be made safe, at all, or that it has been made dangerous in order to make a profit. Either way is terrifying and should lead to a larger skepticism of new technology. The horrible reality of social media, and the ad funded Internet is what has fueled my reluctance to accept crypto currency and AI into my life, as much as it is within my control to do so.
The difference came when the businesses started optimising for engagement rather than happiness or connectedness to friends.
Using engagement, which drives ad revenue, as the metric for success means you design a system that is addictive.
The issue is optimising for engagement because humans are hardwired to find certain things moreish. Our dopamine system is easily abused and hijacked.
Digital communication is good. Engagement optimisation is bad. This means businesses need another model of revenue outside ad revenue, which sadly is the most profitable.
At a lower level, capitalism thrives on over-consumption. Fast fashion, doom scrolling, high-waste food produce supply chains; it's all over-consumption that takes advantage of human psychology to fuel energy gradients from which profits can be found as cash transits across the gradient as people expend energy maintaining it.
This might sound reductive, but until we realise that sustainability in ALL things is very important, and we built that into consumer mindset, we will keep being hijacked on every front.
The question is, how do we design things that are SUSTAINABLE from revenue to user psychology? Given that we can't collectively manage to do that to save our own planet, I don't hold much hope in us even looking for an answer. The system is broken. Sustainability isn't profitable. Humans are myopic.
People have been screaming that at the top of their lungs for years.
At this point I feel like we should pick a time in history, say the late 1930s or 1940s, somewhere around there, and use that as a frame of reference. Any new technology would be assessed based on the value added to average persons life, vs. the overall cost to society and the planet. Only if it hit a certain threshold is it to be implemented. Social media is out right away, negative impact on individual and society and provide little value that postcards and "letters from the readers" didn't already cover.
Making companies liable not for content they host or deliver/show to an explicit recipient or set of recipients, but for content they both host and actively elect to promote, would kill the algorithm feed, suggested videos, et c, but not ordinary Internet hosting services or messaging platforms (or even traditional forums!).
Neither is impossible, and either would probably be good to do anyway.
If the core problem is companies shoving shit at you based on what drives "engagement" and with little regard for anything else, those are policies to look at.
Cost presupposes value. If I'm the buyer in a transaction, I am trading value in exchange for value. The 'cost' is value that I am parting with.
I'm making this pedantic argument to say "cost to society or the planet" is the same as saying that "society" and "the planet" value things, and that those values are at odds with what the individual values.
The concept of "value" presupposes the question "of value to whom and for what?" Only individual people can value things. "Society" is just an arbitrarily defined group of individuals, each with their own values. So at best, what "society" values is what the majority of the individuals within that group value. And "the planet" is a rock. It values nothing.
While I don't think it's your intent, this word game (what "society values") is often used as a sneaky way of justifying transferring value from certain individuals to other individuals. Whoever gets to "represent society" gets to place their values first and claim that it's OK to target the individuals that are "costing society."
The way to approach the issue of social media causing damage is to demonstrate that it is providing a dis-value to all individuals and that each and every individual has healthier alternatives that they can choose that present a greater net value. In some extreme cases, if there is no healthy alternative, and the majority of individuals decide that the dis-value is great enough, they may vote to pass legislation to make the "thing" in question either more expensive or illegal ... such as with the case of tobacco for example.
The late 1930s and 1940s weren't exactly the greatest time to be around, and using that as a yardstick sets us up for a large downhill climb. And then there's the problem that often, changes interact with each other, and their full value (or cost) is only clear when it's together with other inventions.
You can't ask "what would social media in a 1930s society be like, what's the impact". It requires the existence of computers, of the Internet, of ubiquitous device access. These require advanced electronics, rocketry, etc etc.
This also goes in the opposite direction - a "social media is out right away" would end up leaving a ton of people completely isolated. It can't be simply undone, the genie is out of the bottle. (It might also require removing all group texts apps, and you go from there)
We can only do what we've always done - assess risks before implementing, possibly implement, assess actual changes after implementing. There is no idyll we can return to. Only daily work to make things better.
My grandfather used to say: So when was the good old times, because I don't remember them? He was born in 1921.
The point of picking a somewhere in the past would be to avoid debating which things we'd want to get rid of, and instead focus on which technologies would we have adopted, if we had the current knowledge of it's ramifications. E.g. we'd skip the mass adoption of internal combustion engines and go for EVs if we had the full future vision and technology in 1940, so we should get rid of gas and diesel cars.
To it was just to have a reference point where living standards where fairly high and where most of us wouldn't be completely lost, and use that as a starting point for judging the value of various technologies.
Decentralize it, so that nobody is able to make it more addictive for profit.
I’m curious, what if there is something inherently wrong with having too many superficial connections? What if it’s replacing all deep connections, and part of the reason people are feeling unfulfilled?
Or maybe there's also a problem with social media removing friction. E.g. I want to find out what my old high-school buddy is up to, but instead of meeting up of having a phone call, his updates are pushed to my feed, removing the impetus for real social contact.
Software engineers can be weird people (e.g. hyper-introverted) who are averse to thinking through the impacts of the technology they're building. Then there are entrepreneurs whose search for successful products effectively turns them into psychopaths. These are the people who are architecting our society.
BBSes were, once they exceeded a certain size threshold. Usenet had its toxic corners. Large IRC channels without strong moderators were a hellscape.
There are two ingredients to toxicity, as far as I can tell. One is sheer size of a group - you get a million people in a room, you have 1000 assholes of a 1-in-a-1000 caliber in there. It's a pure numbers game.
The second is strong moderation. Moderation that actively intercedes at the first sign of toxicity keeps group conversations less toxic. (For the free speech argument here: I believe we're better off with moderated groups as long as everybody is free to run their own moderated group. Everybody is free to speak, but the rest of the world must be free to choose to not listen - this is where big social media really fails)
Ask Metafilter made the point that possibly "cost of entry" might help as well, but I strongly believe that's ultimately the size argument combined with selection bias reducing the need for moderation.
So what you remember as "less toxic" might well just be "social media was smaller back then". Or more selective groups.
Relatedly, beware of the hidden ads in social media. It takes much less money to astroturf a community like reddit than to advertise through conventional means (e.g. commercials, product placements, banner ads). You may be aware of ads on youtube, but you may not be aware of the ads in the comment section. I've seen youtube comments as follows:
Ed: Christ! My stock portfolio has gone down so much since the pandemic... it hurts.
Bob: Mine did too, however in the past year I've been able to recover financially.
Ed: Really? Please help me, how did you recover your losses?
Bob: I'd hate to share my secret, but Jonathon Harris provided me with amazing investment tips.
Sal: Mr. Jonathon Harris helped 10X our portfolio! You can reach him at [email protected]
That was my re-enactment of their discussion. Sure, that was an example of an obvious ad. But think of all the times you read a conversation about a product or service and became convinced to try something just based on a conversation between two supposed strangers online? I've never bought anything from a conventional ad, but I've purchased plenty of things after reading what the socials say about a product, and that makes me ashamed of myself. Word of mouth is effective for a reason, but it's insidious online. And that's where they get you. Steel your mind, when online.
I don't even know anymore where to get reliable information about...anything.
What does that even mean?
You just said it, and it's also been said by countless people ever since the aforementioned 60s.
It's not taboo, it's trite.
the us isn’t a collective society but an individualistic one
I think you mean simply "controversial".
How does that follow? It's a longstanding controversy. The same arguments have been made over and over again.
> It's important to use words accurately. Contentious, controversial, unpopular, iconoclastic maybe, not trite.
It can be both trite and controversial. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38939106
Social media is a problem to in societies and economies that are wildly different to the US, unless you mean us forming modern societies with groups bigger than 100 people is the problem or you mean those factors lead to the shape of social media as we have it today.
I would imagine that social media would fuck with teenagers in ancient Rome in a similar way than it would with todays teens. There is something universal there.
The problem is that social media in the way they are structured have zero incentives to build good structures for young adults to thrive in and 100% incentives to keep them in a state where they can be influenced. And that is an astable state of insecurity. Which is why many want to be influencer, because then at least you are the one doing the influencing.
The effect was quite dramatic for all of Europe. Way too many things to even enumerate here.
There will be people in 50 years from now blaming everything bad that happens in 2074 on Trump.
The exact time period over which social media has become front and center in daily life is the same period of time in which we’ve watched financial crisis (massive net wealth transfer to the richest) move into loony ZIRP stuff / asset bubbles and attendant massive net wealth transfer to the richest, explode into a cultural war that seems pretty clearly about wealth inequality and social mobility underneath the tribalism paint job (the tribalism stuff is real but people living great don’t go in for populism in insane numbers) slide into a disastrously mishandled pandemic (during which we blew through all previous notional and discounted measures for what rich means), and now everyone is being told that inflation and unemployment are good (they’ve been cooking the CPI forever, that was going on in the 90s that I’ve seen, this made up stuff about abundant good jobs is new).
So whether it’s teens or Gen Z or whatever the case: they have parents and older siblings and can guess about their prospects. Your parents going crazy from economic stress or your adult sibling moving back home has got to be at least up there with unhealthy kinds or amounts of screen time as a stressor.
Now AI is looking like nothing but the biggest lever for hockeystick inequality in history and is overwhelmingly controlled by a few people who give many the creeps.
Is an unhealthy retreat into screen time (and fentanyl) the cause of social collapse? Or are people embracing escapism, tribalism, and substances while eschewing social activities and even sex because the donor class is going for the jugular and they’re looking to pull it off?
So yeah, I think you’re on to something looking a little further back, but it at a minimum very correlated with mortgage meltdown to the present.
Yet the rise in teen mental health is still in parallel in all of the above nations with those heavily affected by the crisis.
Horseshit. I use Facebook and Instagram and love both. When I see something I don't like, I click the 'Don't show me stuff like this' option. I have an endless feed of old european castles, guitars and a couple other obscure hobbies & interests. I have learned things about my hobbies I never would have otherwise and practice them at a higher level.
I learned far more quality information about my hobbies when there were vast Internet forums of users dedicated to discussing them.
Facebook groups and other social media has supplanted most of those forums but presents the information in a much more inferior fashion. However it creates far more engagement by exploiting the same principles as gambling addiction or animal training. Variable expectation of results and the level of work required, scrambling the feed, burying information, creating an inconsistent expectation of experience. That in and of itself wreaks havoc on brain chemistry and brings forth depression just like gambling addiction.
Those rich people created the wealth. Wealth was not "transferred" to Bill Gates, for example.
Gates created products. He then sold these products to people, who believed those products were worth the money they paid for them - i.e. it was an equal value trade. That is how Gates made money. It wasn't a transfer.
Theft, taxes, donations, subsidies and welfare are examples of a transfer of wealth.
No he didn't. His employees did. The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't. So he pays them what they'll accept and keeps the surplus.
But if you're not convinced, consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers when it comes to "poaching"[1] and "noncompete" agreements[2]. These suppress salaries, with the goal of funnelling more money to the C-suite and shareholders instead.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
Gates traded money for the work of his employees. It was a fair trade, as both parties freely agreed. (Pedantically, Gates wrote Microsoft's first product - BASIC.)
> The transfer of wealth was from the employees of Microsoft to Bill Gates by means of information asymmetry: Bill Gates knows what his employees are worth (i.e. the value they create, on average), but they don't.
You imply that they were stupid. They certainly were not. And at any time they could have demanded more money. And at any time they could have quit, started their own company, and received the full value of their work. (Many did so, the PNW is full of them.)
Story time! I know a very successful salesman at Microsoft. He generated vast quantities of sales for Microsoft, and Microsoft paid him well. He could walk into any company and be ushered in to see the CEO, and make a sale. He quit to join a startup and do the sales.
He was unable to close a single deal. He couldn't even get an audience from the decision makers in other companies, let alone see the CEO. He returned to Microsoft, who was happy to get him back.
The point is, it was Microsoft standing behind him that enabled his success. Without that, it just didn't work for him.
> consider the cartel behavior of major SV employers
I know about that. The cartel was a handful of employers. It did not cover the zillions of other tech companies, nor was it remotely effective in stopping startups that they could start.
But I think you make an error when you say or effectively say via implication that market failures don't happen in way that impacts both the public at large and people in our business particularly (not especially, just germane to these threads). Collusion and cartel-style illegality routinely distort markets, almost always to the advantage of the wealthy and connected and almost always at the cost of working people who actually create most of the value. Bludgeoning everyone else out of the personal computer business by breaking the law isn't "creating" value, it's capturing value, via capture.
I don't think too many people frequent this site who don't fundamentally believe in markets as something to embrace, and that number probably rounds to zero for people with my join date, but markets and free exchange are only part of the story: people with ironclad obligations to anything from dependents to the IRS take what is offered in terms of wages and in the presence of market manipulation that is in no way a "free exchange".
I came of age as a hacker during the 90s: I remember exactly how badly Gates had to break the law to get the Department of Justice to go after a domestic economic Cinderella story with hammer and tongs. Those people go after terrorists and money launderers and child traffickers, you have to really color outside the lines to get them to put that on hold to muzzle a domestic company with geopolitical reach. Gates did so for the first time that got him deposed when he tried to strangle the Web in the cradle, and it's neither the first nor the last time he's dealt with regulators or attorneys who'd rather be chasing conventional bad guys around.
Going back even further, the reason why he was the one signing the small(-er) checks and cashing the big ones finds it's origin story in the fact that his parents organized and substantially financed his high school having an IBM mainframe in it at a time when probably a few dozen young people had any access to computers at all outside of maybe the clubs where the Steves were hanging out. By the time the personal computer revolution was taking off he had many years of head start. I hasten to add that I'm not advocating for some draconian policy of creating perfect equality of outcomes or any of that nonsense, but I'm likewise completely unimpressed that he "got there first", he was born down the block and his career from there was pretty much pressing that advantage with brass knuckle tactics until he basically had to retire from public life long enough to re-brand as a philanthropist. He's a really weird example to choose for the case I think you're making. His meme picture before we even called it that was him in a Borg suit.
The major players tried to break the back of the last upwardly mobile desk profession again in the 2004-2010 timeframe, when again the people who go after al Quaeda for a day job decided it was bad enough to slap them hard enough to back off a little, which coupled with Sheryl defecting and paying "market" wages in the 2009-2014 timeframe incentivized a whole generation of people to go into CS. Sheryl was paying 2-5x what Eric was, which one was "market"? It's a hard case to make the case it was the guy who said in email that we need to suppress wages.
Now they're at it again, no the mass layoffs followed by record-shattering EPS beats weren't a coincidence or because of COVID hiring, in fact they're hiring a bunch of those people back now that it's clear that GPT-4 isn't obsoleting the regular Internet in the imminent future, though wages haven't recovered and plenty of veteran hackers are still burning savings to make mortgage payments that were predicated on the comp packages they signed up for (a decidedly asymmetrical situation). I can't prove this because everything I know about this that isn't plain as day was said off the record, but I also don't make shit like that up.
I'd petition you as someone people look up to (I certainly do) to examine why you feel so strongly that markets are generally free, employment is generally truly at will at truly "market" wages, and the status quo around all this is something we should all accept?
Then they went to Harvard, which also had a computer available to students. I expect most universities at the time did. They took advantage of it to develop a Basic interpreter. Nobody else at Harvard did, nor did any other students in the country who had access. Basics were developed for other processors by other people.
IBM came to Gates to get a DOS for their PC. Gates didn't have one, and sent them to Gary Kildall. Kildall failed to recognize the opportunity, and sent them back to Gates. Gates didn't have to be presented with opportunity twice. He still didn't have a DOS, but figured he could get one. He bought one from Tim Patterson for $50,000. Patterson also failed to notice the opportunity.
And the rest, as they say, is history. What is clear is that Gates/Allen were hardly the only one who had opportunity, but they were the only ones to recognize the opportunity. Nobody was cheated. Money was not extracted from anybody. It was all fair deals.
A couple years later, Steve Jobs also saw opportunity where nobody else did. We all know the result. Woz wrote a Basic without access to any other computer, showing this was hardly impossible.
I also had those opportunities, but I FAILED TO RECOGNIZE them, and so missed out on being a multi-billionaire. I was not rooked out of opportunity. Nobody oppressed me. I'm not angry about it. I, and tens of thousands of others, simply failed to see the opportunity, and/or lacked the guts to take the risk and to the hard work needed to take advantage of it.
I also competed straight up with Microsoft in the 1980s, and was fairly successful at it. I recognized the opportunity that C++ offered (finally I bet on the right horse!), and capitalized on it, doing very well by having the only native C++ compiler that worked on DOS. Until Microsoft and Borland belatedly got into that market, and yet I still prospered with it.
Microsoft and Borland never tried to bury me with any tactics, they eventually outcompeted me. Microsoft did try to buy me out at one point, but I declined as I thought the offer was too low. I turned out to be right on that one, too. Borland tried to hire me, too, but the offer was insufficient.
Microsoft was a tough competitor, sure, and if you wanted to compete with them you had to bring your A game. I've seen a lot of their competitors frankly whine about it, when they were making obvious missteps that were the actual architect of their demise.
At no point did Microsoft ever force anyone to work for them or force anyone to buy their products.
I can't imagine an entirely neutral social media platform would be any different.
people are going to follow whoever engages them the most. the inventives, regardless of the algorithms used, are exactly the same. no manipulation by the social media companies required. all that's needed is a public voice and followers
But I still remember the internet of old. Not only the small, semi-gated internet forums, but at also when Facebook just started out and you would just talk to your friends and not everything would be about polarising subjects.
This is clearly something that has changed due to social media algorithms, though maybe as a society we're now already brainwashed by it and I'm not sure if we can go back.
Literacy was over 95% in 2010 in Indonesia. It takes 5 seconds to Google for it. Since most of Indonesia are Moslems, they learn to read the Koran at an early age. Yes, I know that small parts of Lombok are Hindus.
Because they value profits over anything else? The only thing they care about it is having people spend more and more time on the webpages. You'd be surprised at the caliber of talent that spends their valuable years optimising for this. More ad revenue at the expense of mental health is totally acceptable for interwebs comps.
During COVID when the world got inside we just realised how sick 'social connection' sites are, from doomscrolling to outsourcing self-esteem to Tinder. It's an organised system of hijacking attention and minds.
It's capitalism. That's the answer you're looking for
We had capitalism for a LONG time before we had the international teen mental illness epidemic.
Things started to change towards "free market" neoliberalism (AKA voodoo economics) in around the 1970's, and the rate of the change exploded after the fall of Soviet Union.
To tie it into the article, the social media dynamic, young girls seeing themselves as never-ending beauty projects that have to get lip-fillers, more clicks, more likes, compete with each other, is just the logic of capital without even someone needing to subject them to it, they're doing it themselves.
Capital's eaten all the physical space, it's still hungry so it's gobling up all the mental space, and information tech was the vector to jump from one to the other. And it does to the mental environment exactly what it did to physical spaces once its done harvesting them.
The protestant reformation then was an attempt to wrest property away from the catholic organization and distribute it. The goal being to eliminate the primary economic organization and "democratize" it.
The concept of hoarding property flowed from scarcity anxieties that are only socially maintained and hoarding property is the root issue
You can read my proof here: https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
No matter, you’ll simply make the following argument: that might makes right because those indigenous cultures couldn’t stand up to the genocidal domination tactics of property based thought right?
This is how perfectly predictable this argument is.
If I predict ahead of time that my plans to install a puppet government in Machuria and invade China are going to be compared unfavorably to Japan's actions in WW2, that doesn't somehow magically make the comparison inaccurate just because I predicted it.
I’ll say it for the millionth time:
The Trotskiest-Leninist State-Command Economy (aka USSR) is not the opposite or even that much different than State Capitalism.
I won’t fight this strawman
Communism/socialism failed like Chernobyl reactor number 4.
Adopting a new socio-economic system some young cocky pal imagines in his head? Nope, thank you. I'm too old and experienced for that. Not in a million of years.
This is the kind of worldview that comes from years of navel-gazing in a therapist's office. "Why do I beat my kids? ...Because my father beat me! Now that I understand why I do it, I can stop beating my kids..." Or, you could just stop beating your kids.
It doesn't matter why it happens, it just matters that it happens. But instead of preventing or discouraging kids (or people in general) from using social media, you can blame the ghost of Ronald Reagan--the gift that keeps on giving.
Which of these approaches is more likely to result in someone changing their behaviour? Is there any evidence that advice to “just stop X” is as or more effective than causally aligned methods?
What an unusual attitude for an engineer to have. I suppose you fix bugs by “just not writing bugs in the first place”, too.
There is clear evidence that taking longer to stop beating your kids is more harmful to them so less effective than just stop beating them.
You cannot compare that. The proof of this is that the FCC has safety regulations against how close you are to the sources. But these were devised with two and 3G technologies. Also, most of the studies are not real world studies, and so they lack many of the key characteristics of our exposure.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...
And make no mistake, I think a lot of people could be positively affected by this type of electromagnetic radiation, unfortunately, I don’t think I’m one of those, however. It’s really mostly about genetics.
This is the kind of broad brush statement that makes people face-palm. A "voltage gated" anything is necessarily affected by electromagnetic fields, because that's what those words mean…
…but the character of that effect depends almost entirely on the specifics. Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000 Hz, whereas most of the new RF noise is about 6 orders of magnitude higher frequency. To understand why 6 orders of magnitude matters, if you go up a further 6 orders of magnitude you get slightly more than the entire range of visible light (red light is ~500e12 Hz, violet is ~800e12).
What might genuinely affect our brain chemistry is the 50-60 Hz range of the mains grid… except we've had that all over the place since electricity was introduced, so this trend wouldn't be new in developed nations, it would be a thing that shows up in the statistics from the interwar era when we got electricity, and the only places that would get this trend now would be places that are finally getting electricity for the first time ever.
If there is a signal for this, I've never heard of it. That doesn't mean there isn't one, but that's what you actually need to look for, not a statement that's technically so general it can be said about literally everything in the universe including spacetime itself, but even with more generous interpretations is still general to the point of trivially applying to basically everything you ever experience.
It’s not a broadbrush statement, it’s a very specific statement. It’s a statement that this is how EMFs can affect our neurology and our biology. I don’t understand you’re complained about this at all.
> Specifically, your brain cells do things at about 100-1000 Hz, whereas most of the new RF noise is about 6 orders of magnitude higher frequency.
Why are you assuming there has to be some residence between the EMFs and the speed of the fire neurons for the voltage gated ion channels to be triggered or disrupted? This makes no sense.
There’s plenty of signal, you just don’t have the antennas to receive it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6513191/
There is considerable evidence that exposure to RF-EMF could cause various types of genotoxic effects in cells (Lai and Singh, 2004; Lee et al., 2005; Phillips et al., 2009; Ruediger, 2009; Xu et al., 2010). Exposure to RF-EMFs (1,800 MHz, SAR 2 W/kg) caused DNA oxidative damage in the mitochondria, DNA fragmentation and DNA strand breaks in neurons (Xu et al., 2010). This have been reported in lymphocytes exposed to various ranges of RF-EMFs (Phillips et al., 2009). In addition, RF-EMF exposure has been reported to cause chromosomal instability, alteration of gene expression and gene mutations. Such genetic toxic effects have been reported in, but are not limited to, neurons, blood lymphocytes, sperm, red blood cells, epithelial cells, hematopoietic tissue, lung cells and bone marrow (Magras and Xenos, 1997; Mashevich et al., 2003; Demsia et al., 2004; Zhao et al., 2007; Baan et al., 2011). It has also been found that exposure to electromagnetic radiation, a type of RF-EMF, increases the incidence of chromosomal aneuploidy (Mashevich et al., 2003). Genetic toxic effects, including aneuploidy, can lead to genetic disorders with abnormal gene formation, and can even lead to cancer (Hoeijmakers, 2009).
That fact you think your statement isn't broadbrush suggests you don't understand the rest of my previous comment.
All interactions in your daily life are either the electromagnetic field, or gravity. Even though some of the radiation you're constantly experiencing is coming from the weak nuclear force, the radiation that does your chemistry any harm is the bit that interacts via electromagnetic fields.
It's EM fields that make lighting bolts work. It's EM fields that travel along your nerves. It's EM fields that stop you from falling through the floor, that keep the floor intact, and stop the Earth from collapsing into a black hole. It's EM fields that give you sunburn and vitamin D.
Saying "EM fields affects us" is as true as saying "chemicals affect us": Yes, light is an EM field, water is a chemical. You don't get to remove these things from our environment, they are our environment.
That is why it's such a ridiculously broad brush. Without specifying power level, duration, and frequency, one can get literally any result from no impact to you exploding (which would happen not only from too much, but also if one were to suppress every EM field in your body).
> Why are you assuming there has to be some residence between the EMFs and the speed of the fire neurons for the voltage gated ion channels to be triggered or disrupted? This makes no sense.
Because basically all electrical interactions depend on frequency. If I have a circuit with a capacitor in it, that acts as a high-pass filter; if I have one with an inductor in it, that acts as a low-pass filter. Almost everything acts a bit like both a capacitor and an inductor, including our bodies.
And the fact you think that makes no sense, suggests you don't know the absolute basics of electronics, because I managed to pick that up from 101 courses.
Likewise, basically all chemicals in your body have different responses depending on which wavelengths of EM field they're exposed to. Your brain is wired to respond strongly to extremely low frequencies.
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6513191/
You should have led with that.
But…
…that quote was on the section about genotoxic effects, which have almost nothing in common with anything from the section of calcium channels, judging by the citations used.
A different quote from the same link:
> Thus, the vague fear for the many unknown effects of RF-EMF exposure is expressed as ungrounded negative effects not only to the scientific community but also to the general public. In addition to this, scientific data published by various researchers have been contradictory in their outcome.
Also, you’re thinking as a technician, not as a biologist.
I encourage you if you’re so skeptical to keep reading the papers. I’m not going to post on hacker news anymore because my original comment was flagged and I think that’s censorship and bias in this community that I’m not going to tolerate.
>I know you’re all gonna laugh at this
Alas it is this attitude itself that might become laughable. I don't get what is so incredibly unbelievable about EMF interacting with biology, and I certainly hope we don't discover this the wrong way.
I’m not gonna post on hacker news anymore, there’s just too much noise.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014765132...
The algorithms are aimed at farming attention for the paying customers; advertisers. To do that, the algorithms shovel outrage, instant trends, negativity, and massively amplified in-group out-group dichotomies... They do all of this on purpose. This is new.
None of today's teenagers are impacted by the Vietnam war, by Reagan, or anything from the 80s at all. Gen X felt those things. But a teenager today was born between 2003 and 2010. Most of them don't even know who Jack Welch is or that Chrysler used to be one of the "Big 3" (and used to be called Chrysler). But they know what TikTok is, they know Twitter, and Twitch, and YouTube, and Instagram. And they suffer from interacting with a system designed to manipulate attention. These systems are far more immediately detrimental to mental health, especially for someone entering adolescence when negative emotional complexes arise naturally as a neurological consequence of maturing, than any of the business or political activities of the 80s.
Zuckerberg's own company had studies that showed this to be true. Studies that showed dramatic increases in suicidal tendencies among teenage girls on social media as compared to those who avoided it, for example. They know their systems are harmful. Social media is this generations Big Tobacco.
If we have to blame someone, maybe we're looking at exactly the right people in 2024 when we cast our gaze at Zuckerberg, Pichai, and the government running TikTok.
No, it's cigarettes.
I refer to social media companies as "tobacco companies of the mind."
Now Reagan caused teen mental illness, too?
What's next, Reagan caused Covid?
https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids
The only real constant I can see across all countries is increasing interconnectedness, human movement, and rate of change. Kids increasingly find themselves living in a world far different from their parents and even more radically different from their grandparents. Laws, culture, school, and parenting all can't adapt quickly enough. If social media is doing anything on its own, it's the same as what regular media was doing but bigger and faster. More information is coming at you from more directions, your parents and family don't know about it, it's increasingly less trustworthy (compare viral Tweet to Nighttime News to wisdom handed down from a grandparent), the perspectives are increasingly divorced and different from what your family or culture would have presented to you.
It's a lot. None of it is necessarily bad. But it's a lot. If dealing with anything at all presents a challenge, then dealing with more of it presents more of a challenge. The threats humans face are increasingly benign, threats to beliefs and identity even as health, hunger, and survival are mostly taken care of. But there are nonetheless more of them and they come at you faster, at least if you stay connected and pay attention, and the human psyche is not equipped to deal with that. We do well with one major threat every few days that is familiar. It may be a tiger lurking in the trees that can kill us, but we know they're there and there aren't a lot of them. Four mean kids at school can't kill you, but they may torment you every single day. A social media feed full of bad events, people telling you the world is terrible, people telling you your culture is terrible, whatever it is, may be "words" rather than sticks and stones, but even if they hurt less, they do hurt, and there are so many more of them. Think of differences in experience from living on an island with a few giant predators who might attack once a month on average, mostly in a specific season, and you're good all the rest of the time, compared to being perpetually covered in mosquitoes and rats. It's breaking a leg but healing compared to chronic pain that never goes away.
Modern life, first with newspapers and cities, then with schools and office politics and rat races, then with 24 hour news cycles and political horseraces, now with social media, and trending toward the latter. The threats are individually tiny but there are so damn many of them that people feel overwhelmed if they can't step back and disconnect.
This is true everywhere and has nothing to do with unions disappearing or the breakdown of family values in the US. These are just the manifestations of modernity as they happened here, but something analogous and equally anxiety inducing happened somewhere else.
Vietnam was terrible on the home-front.
Prior to the truth of the Vietnam war coming out, ordinary Americans tended to gave the benefit of the doubt to the government. They lost the baby boomer’s trust with Vietnam.
Bush 43’s Iraq war did the same to Gen X.
For Millenial Americans it was the government’s ruinous response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Then the COVID debacle happened.
Fast forward to the present moment where the vast majority of Americans have never seen functional institutions in their or their parent’s or grandparent’s lifetime.
A shockingly high percentage of gen z colleagues I speak with see government institutions, the American government itself, healthcare, tech, banking, capitalism, etc to be a giant scam. They believe they’re on their own and cannot count on society in any way for support.
They feel like they’re alone in the woods. I think it contributes to their anxiety.
Those changes are multi-generational changes, and more probably there are a multitude of factors behind it. Family structure, economy factors, crime, drugs, values and taboos changing too fast, uncertainty about the future.
We will probably won't find a culprit, but if I had to bet, I would say that far reaching event like the Vietnam war, reagonomics, the downsizing mania from the 80's are probably more important factors than the recent creation of social networks. If we have to blame someone, maybe we should be looking at figures like Lee Yacoca, Carl Icahn, and Jack Welch instead of Mark Zukerberg.